


31:  The Radio Is Gonna Play That Song

by light_source



Series: High Heat [31]
Category: Baseball RPF, Sports RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-03
Updated: 2011-12-03
Packaged: 2017-10-26 20:18:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/287436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/light_source/pseuds/light_source
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>- So tell me something, Barry, Tim continues. - After you’ve gotten used to this - after you’ve done it for a bunch of years - how do you know who you really are?</p>
            </blockquote>





	31:  The Radio Is Gonna Play That Song

Lincecum wraps his arms around his chest and stands there in the cleareyed dark of the big windows. The western sky has emptied itself, and below the ragged fringe of creosote and saltbush at the edge of Zito’s property, the rush-hour freeway roars like surf.

In the silence that follows, Tim can sense rather than see Zito moving around the room, sliding closed the glass doors and hooking the cleats on the clerestory windows.

After a while Tim walks towards the center of the big room and collapses into the corner of the couch, the seat-cushion puffing out the smell of leather and cleaning fluid. He slips one hand behind his waist and fishes out the kilim-covered pillow that’s been poking into his back. He tosses it across the room and reaches his elbow up for the armrest, drawing up his knee into the crook of his other arm.

\- Sorry about the combination, says Zito finally. - My fault.

He pads over, his bare feet flashing pale in the dark, and sinks into the chair across from the couch.

\- Why’d you change it? asks Tim finally. - I had the number in my phone from when you gave it to me.

\- I always change it at the end of the old season, says Zito. - By the end of the year, I’ve usually given it out to so many people that I can’t remember who’s still got the code. Can’t leave it like that over the winter - this place’d be a prime target.

\- But then, he continues, - by the time spring training rolls around, I’ve usually forgotten whatever the new thing is. So every spring I wind up standing down there at the gate just like you were today, calling Ricky.

\- Ricky?

\- Ricky Salazar. Pitching coach when I was with the Rockhounds. Retired now - they’re in Phoenix cause his wife’s family’s down in Nogales. He watches the place when I’m not here.

Tim looks up at Barry, and their eyes lock in the loose darkness.

\- The reason why he was here, why Haren was here - well, you know about the trade, he’s gotta move them down here, says Zito, stumbling word by word. - I told him to go ahead and use the place in January when he was house-hunting. He came back up here today to get a shirt he left. He was leaving when you called.

\- Yeah, well, I’ve got excellent timing, says Lincecum.

 _Fuck._ It’s like Zito’s up, the count’s 0-and-2, and Tim’s not even sweating out there.

\- The thing is, Tim continues after awhile, - it wouldn’t be that hard to crack. The combination. I mean, _duh._ Your birth date backwards. You oughta be able to come up with something a little more elegant, Barry.  Something harder to figure out.

//

From the edge of the couch, Tim unfolds himself into a standing stretch, grabbing at the air above his head. His sweater rides up, hanging off the hollow of his belly below his ribcage, the strip of bare skin driftwood-pale in the dark.

Zito leans his head back. The way Tim carries himself reminds him of a spidery-legged foal that looks fragile but can wheel and flee in an instant. From where Barry’s sitting, Tim’s muscles are no more than a rumor underneath his jeans and sweater, but Zito knows that means just about nothing. And that wayward and impossible hair, like a kid’s. Like Danny’s, the wildness of it, something Zito loves without knowing why.

 _But he’s not going there, he’s not._

\- There’s a pool out there? Tim asks.

\- Yeah, says Zito, - but the heat’s just been turned on, it’s still pretty cold.

\- Good, says Tim. - I’m liking cold. Cold is good.

The sliding door sucks closed behind him.

//

Zito’s heart knocks against his sternum, wanting out.

He sits with himself awhile there in the dark, shoulders sinking back as finds his breath. The liquor cabinet’s stocked - Ricky’s seen to that - but there’s not enough booze in the house to push what’s happened out of his head.

His mind wanders like a loose dog; what comes up is the memory of being punched off his feet in a junior-high-school fight: first the sickening crunch of his head against the tar-smelling asphalt, then finding himself windless, sprawling, gulping air like a caught fish.

He gets up, banging his shin on the end-table, and shuffles forward haltingly in the dark, struggling to remember where things are, groping along the tops of the chairs. When he flips on the master rheostat in the kitchen, the open space floods slowly with an amber glow that reminds Zito crazily of the way the lights come up at the start of a play.

The bottle opener and the single bent Corona cap are sitting on the kitchen table where he left them, like a reprimand.

He rummages through the freezer for the bottle of Absolut he keeps there, his hand numb and unsteady as he glugs a juice glass half-full. Then he slams the whole thing back in a single shot. His stomach nearly revolts against the vodka going down: it’s icy, metallic, smoking into vapor in his mouth.

He props himself on the counter with his forearms, his head sunk between his shoulders, sweat beading the back of his neck. Slowly the alcohol burns down his gut and blooms warm inside him. It’s purifying, he tells himself as he swallows the last of the harsh blowback. It’s how you’d clean a wound, if it was dirty enough, no matter how brutally it stung.

It’s searing away the taste of Haren’s mouth. Of his own mouth, wanting.

//

The door slides open and Tim comes back in, shirtless and barefoot, his cotton sweater in one hand and a towel in the other. His jeans, the knees worn thin, are stained dark with poolwater in the places where he’s used his wet hands to pull them on. His skin’s still shiny with wet.

\- The water’s just about perfect, Tim says - just warm enough to make getting out colder than staying in. You should go have a swim, he says, tossing his sweater onto a chair.

Zito’s just standing there, his hands on his hips, feeling like he’s readying himself for something.

Tim stops in front of him, and after he towels his hair roughly, he rakes it back with his hands. His face has settled into a mask of determination: this is how he looks on the days when he starts, chin thrust out, eyes narrow.

\- It’s always gonna be like this, isn’t it, Barry? he asks.

\- What?

\- I’m always gonna be wondering, says Tim, - who that is on the phone.  Who’s that woman you got your arm around. He looks at Zito, whose eyes are focused over his shoulder, somewhere else. - What that car’s doing at the gate.

\- And you’re always gonna have a story. A good story. You’re just friends, the two of you are in on it, you’re giving the paparazzi what they want so they’ll leave you alone.

With some difficulty Zito meets Lincecum’s eyes.  Tim’s as pale as a newly dug root, standing there, and as tough and surprising.

\- I been living my life in public awhile, says Zito slowly, after a time. - And one of the things I’ve learned is that you gotta compromise.

\- Everything’s still really simple to you, he goes on. - Black-and-white. I’m not living in that world, Timmy, and I don’t think you are either.

\- Yeah, says Tim, - I get it. Right. We give ‘em what they want cause _they_ can’t deal with the truth.

Zito just looks at him.

\- So tell me something, Barry, Tim continues. - After you’ve gotten used to this - after you’ve done it for a bunch of years - how do you know who you really are? 

Zito, his head starting to spin from the vodka, sags into the corner of the leather couch.

Tim hauls his sweater back on over his head and uses his fingers to smooth out his shaggy hair, tucking his grown-out bangs behind behind his ears.

\- That early call tomorrow, Bochy’s got some crackpot idea about how we’re gonna change around the batteries - something, I don’t know what, he says.

\- See you at the yard, he says, sliding into the pair of battered Rainbows, imprinted with the contours of his feet, that he’d slipped off earlier by the corner of the coffee table.

Zito on the couch, his back to the entryway, hears the front door shut behind him, the click of the tongue in the latch.

//

When Zito wakes up he’s been running like hell in his dream, a wall of filthy grey water behind him surging faster than it takes his scream to hit the sky.

It’s still the middle of the night, he realizes, he’s still on the leather sofa, still in his clothes, the lights still blazing all around him. His mouth tastes like ash and soot and the strange edge of bloody. He sits up, feeling the knot in his left trapezoid from his head being jammed up against the armrest. He rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. His heart’s rattling out beats faster than he can count them.

On the coffee table, the blue eye of his cellphone blinks with saintly patience: _new :: 5 :: messages._

//

Danny’s chosen the Draw Ten, Zito figures, because of the groove they’d worn there in the Oakland days, getting drunk and shooting sloppy pool and telling lies that in most cases were only slightly more outrageous than what’d actually happened. Phoenix Municipal Stadium, spring-training home of the Oakland A’s, is right in the city’s epicenter of squareness, its corners pegged down by the Phoenix Zoo and the Hall of Flame Firefighting Museum (and National Hall of Firefighting Heroes). In such a beachhead of upstandingness, massage parlors and off-track betting franchises and bars - even sports bars - tend to be unwelcome.

So when Barry was playing for Oakland, the Draw Ten was always the players’ bar of choice because it was the closest - a five-minute drive - and the most anonymous, in a light-industrial park, sandwiched between a furniture warehouse and the regional office of the Neptune Cremation Society. They’d roll out after a game, not bothering to shower because what’s the point, and attack the Draw Ten like a pack of dogs on a squirrel.  

After awhile, they’d become such a fixture, even on game days, that no one there was likely to look at them twice, or ask for an autograph, or hand them a hot damp squirming baby to hold for a picture-with.  And after games that’s what they needed, a place where no one bothered to ask, no one, not even girls with long brown slender thighs.

Lucky the parking spaces are big here, thinks Zito as he swerves into a spot. He’s surprised that he’s only noticed this now. Those double-line painted dividers, he realizes, are there for a reason: they’re what keeps your fenders whole when the angry drunk next to you pulls out way too fast and crazy. He’s pulled into the same space he used to always go for, back then, next to the Dumpster where the busboys gather on their breaks to smoke and complain.

This spot’s usually empty, he realizes, not just because garbage stinks quickly in Phoenix.  It's also because nobody likes to meet the eyes of the busboys, thinks Zito - it’s where any of us could have been except for baseball.

Danny’s big white SUV, which always reminds Zito of O.J. Simpson’s glory ride up the 405, gleams dealership-perfect in the corner of the lot, its dark windows giving up nothing.

The boozy, old-cigarette smell and the cool darkness of the Draw Ten feel like the hair of the dog for Zito; the handful of Advil, the B12 tablets and the three glasses of orange juice he downed this morning haven’t done much to soften the edges of his hangover. He finds Danny in a booth at the back, near the battered payphone, which has a handwritten sign taped up over where the receiver should be.

The stereo speaker above their table is blasting too much treble. 

 _Somebody’s gonna hurt someone  
Before the night is through_

Who the fuck's that singing, Zito wonders absently; his brain’s moving about as fast as an old guy off the line when the light turns green. The Eagles, he realizes, the answer locking satisfyingly into place: the Eagles. He slides into the booth and signals the barmaid for a Bud. The cordovan vinyl seat’s split down the middle like a gaping wound, bulging white fuzz, and his weight only seems to be pulling the stitches out.

\- That’s one a Jake Souther's songs, says Zito, not yet ready to meet Danny’s eyes, - he's the guy who wrote a lot of their best ones. Him and Glenn Frey were drunk one night in somebody’s living room. They started clapping, doing the backbeat together, and that’s how he got the idea for it.  Random.

\- So many things in life like that, random, says Danny finally. He’s on his third beer; the first two bottles are still in front of him, their insides foam-streaked, their labels peeled down to the white part.

The barmaid slouches over to their table and plonks Zito’s beer down on a paper coaster. When she reaches over to take Haren’s empties, he jams his spread-out hand above them protectively.

\- N’ thanks, he says, - jes leave ‘em.  I need ‘em.  For a science project, he says, grinning up at her goofily.

He’s so beautiful, those blue eyes and that smile that curves up on one side, that even though he’s drunk off his ass she has to smile back. As she's shaking her head.

\- I need to know where I been, Barry, says Haren when she’s finally gone back to the bar, - I gotta keep track a something.

 _Everybody wants to take a little chance  
Make it come out right_

Zito takes a long slow and very complete hit off his beer and licks the foam off his top lip. Fuck the Advil and the B12, he thinks, why mess around? Beer’s the shortest distance between two points, he realizes, marveling at the way the ache behind his eyes has already started to soften.

\- You want a game a eight-ball? says Haren. - Old times. You still owe me fifty bucks, you motherfucker. That time with Richie? You remember that?

\- You’re too fucking drunk already, Danny. Look, I gotta tell you, I don’t know what to say. Why I came here.

\- As far as I’m concerned, Barry says,- it’s been over since it was over.

\- What happened last night, Zito goes on, - I think it’s just like one of those reflexes, like the way your leg kicks out when they hit your knee with the mallet. At the doctor. You know what I’m saying?

Haren nods, licking his top lip with the tip of his tongue. He’s stopped peeling the label from his Labatt’s and drawn both hands up to grip the edge of the table with his long fingers, knuckles bright with the pressure.

Their eyes meet and Zito suddenly feels a wash of dizziness that picks him up and sets him down somewhere else, like a wave he hasn’t seen coming. It's not the beer and it's not the hangover; it's another thing entirely, a thing he doesn't trust.

\- Yeah, you’re right, Barry, your usual expert analysis, says Haren, spitting the words out with the careful diction of the newly drunk. He sighs. Then suddenly his eyes are a little more focused, his mouth a little less slack, and Zito can see the white tips of his teeth between his parted lips.

\- Problem is, says Haren, - I’m lying. Not like that’s anything new, he says ruefully, with that slow sideways glance Zito remembers and loves.

\- It wadn’t a reflex, he continues. - I don’t know what it was, but I habn’t been able to walk straight since last night, and the beer I been drinking’s the least of it. I’m bangin’ into things, Barry. I haven't slept; my body's in some kind of weird overdrive, I can't sit still.  It’s more than just nothing.

\- Not everything’s nothing, Haren says, - even though you say so.

Zito sits up and pushes himself away from the table, his face frozen.

Haren looks up at Zito. - So now what?

\- I’m calling you a cab, says Zito, rifling his jeans pocket for his cell. He pulls out what’s in there - his wallet and his keys and a coffee-stained handkerchief - and puts them on the table.  At the bottom there’s half a movie ticket too.  No phone.

\- Where’s your phone?

‘S in the car, says Haren. - Charging. It ran out last night, keep forgetting to plug the damn thing in.

 _We can beat around the bushes  
we can get down to the bone_

The song’s been over for awhile, but as they step out into the aching brightness of early spring, it’s wormed its way into Zito’s ear, pressing against the back of his eyes.

//

How it happens from there doesn’t matter. None of it matters, Zito thinks as Haren slams him up against the wall just inside the doorway of the not-yet-furnished house, the sound of their clenching mouths echoing off the freshly latexed walls. There’s no bed yet, and there's no couch, there's not even a dining-room table. But it doesn’t matter, because what they’re doing is so far beyond what’s advisable or smart or possible that Zito can't imagine doing it any other way.

So they collapse on the floor, on the soft thick wall-to-wall carpet that still smells of the showroom. After a while, Haren rolls them over so that Zito can see his face, so the kiss can become Barry's idea, so that he can claim it as what he wants.

Barry lets himself breathe in Danny’s smell, lets himself wander back into the dream, the familiar darkness of what he knows he loves.

 

**Author's Note:**

> "Heartache Tonight," which the Eagles released as a single in 1979, was written by Don Henley, Glenn Frey, J. D. Souther, and Bob Seger.
> 
> Thanks to horizon_greene for her advisement about Phoenix.


End file.
